


Knucklebone to Screwdriver

by OwnThyself



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Biting, Everyone Is Alive, Everyone is Dead, F/M, Interspecies Relationship(s), Post-Episode: s09e11 Heaven Sent, Post-Episode: s09e12 Hell Bent, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Sex in a TARDIS, Soulmates, Temporal Paradox, War, whouffaldi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-07
Updated: 2016-01-07
Packaged: 2018-05-12 09:07:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,330
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5660734
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OwnThyself/pseuds/OwnThyself
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Everything in him should be an ache, yet it isn’t. He is fine-tuned, painless except for the parts of him that do not touch her. He is in no pain that cannot be purified through her impossibility.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Knucklebone to Screwdriver

**Author's Note:**

  * For [StarkAstarte](https://archiveofourown.org/users/StarkAstarte/gifts).



He told no one about the dead birds.

Not during all of his time, and all of theirs. There were so many fellow travellers, so few tidy endings. It would have been a small thing, in comparison to moonshatter, dark water, world-swallow, to say

_When I was six, I saw my first dead bird, and I kept it in ways you wouldn’t expect._

No one expects a war architect to wear feathers in his memory suit of armour. If the Doctor knew anything, he knew that people, human or otherwise, come to dread the questions they didn’t know how to ask. Sooner than later, every wedding bed blooms briars; every state of grace gets eaten from within. He learned how to keep the softer secrets, those it would have been so good to share, by starfall and new, new birth, and beneath the watchful eyes of the wound-makers themselves: the stitchers, reavers and spatial seamstresses of this bright, dangerous waking. Some things are not for saying. Some beds are not for marriage. He knows what it’s like, to be silent, and to be married. Oh, he can talk. Oh, he can flee a church. But he knows more about both states than he says, or vows. Never show your whole hand. Not to your travellers. Not to your wife.

Clara looks up at him, not dead, already decaying. Her mouth parts, birdsong bleeding through. He hears her through the pressure of billions of years, breaking brittle beneath his knuckles. His hands should hurt so much more than they do. Everything in him should be an ache, yet it isn’t. He is fine-tuned, painless except for the parts of him that do not touch her. He is in no pain that cannot be purified through her impossibility.

“Touch me,” someone says. Ragged. Exultant. It is a voice that knows how to lie, but has no need of it, right now. It could be either of them. Perhaps it is them both.

When he kisses her, dead as alive, he tastes every beautiful lie she has ever told. He curls his tongue around a calculated fib, ghosts his teeth over the long game of a deception meant to dredge another war-suitor from his grave. A lesser war. A lesser soldier. Which is to say, a better man than he could be altogether. That man knew well enough to die more than once for Clara Oswald, which means that he was either born with good sense, or grew into the hungry ambition of loving her and refusing to let the world lose her bright, reckless footfall.

He kisses her again, feels her give her mouth up to him, feels the press of her nails invading his collar, blunt insistence and desperation. Her trousers unfasten in the careful mess his hands make, wedding ring gleaming bright over the clothes she was clawed breathless in. He watched her fall in these threads, turned on his heel and walked into a world where she stayed splayed, unbreathing, with the sound of her scream sliding wetly between his one heart and the other.

If you asked him how long it took to rinse a sound clean, he would tell you that four and a half billion years couldn’t do it. If she asked him, he would lie. And she would taste it.

She tastes like their last adventure and their first. Does gunsmoke have a flavour? Are stratagems shy on the underside of a mouth painted sheer red? Carnelians for what else but fighting? Clara. Clara, please…

“I’m scared.”

Not him. Definitely not him, that time. He already made that confession once, didn’t he? A breath or a billion hence. His terror isn’t for her, not when there’s so little time stitching them together now. It is what happens when you save an impossible girl from the best of all possible deaths. The questions you wish you once knew how to ask come for you, swiftwinged like ravens, faster on the wind than the first birds a boy might find, at six.

Her hands in his hair. His teeth in her neck. He bites her, then bites her deeper, and she curves her throat for the tattoo of it. He is angrier than he has ever been that she tried to subtract herself from a universe that makes nothing quite so brave, without her in it. He wants her to taste his anger. Beneath her, in the small of her back, the console levers whine and shift. If she arches the wrong way, she could plummet them both into a galaxy funeral, an assassin cluster, a thief belt of planets longing for any likely murder. If she moves under him like she isn’t his, they could hurtle to their newest pair of deaths, cursing and grinning and tearing at each other’s armour.

He shivers as she strips him in the war room he’s fled the worlds in, works her free as she wants to be, hears one of them cry out something, incisor-first, as he sinks into her. His hands should be rougher than this, on her. They bruised like any instruments will. They bled in pursuit of a better burial. For her. For him. For them both.

“I’ve got you.” His hands in her hair. Her one heart presses against the cage of her chest, that lifeless, everliving transport, and he wonders as he works into her – why did he not think of transplantation on the cobblestones of the trap street? Why did he not cut out one selfish heart to feed into her still-warm body? (So warm, Clara, like Christmas and a carol sing while the rest of the stratosphere rings with air raids.) Why did he not act as the one thing he made his name in – as her surgeon?

She reaches between them, drags one set of knuckles to her lips. He feels her mouth blessing the wounds like she knows exactly where he put them. Her mouth on his paltry instruments of survival are stronger than any diamonds. Four hundred times stronger, and four hundred times still. Her mouth is warm. Warm like living. Heat like Still Here.

He grips her wrists and pushes her harder against the console, his boots skidding before they grip for purchase, pressing his face blind into her hair, inhaling everything he can that lives. He doesn’t check her too close for the pulse he knows isn’t there.

“I will always find you,” one of them sobs, and he is deeper inside her than any bottomless lie either of them have told for freedom or pantomime or the raw felicity of their own cleverness crackling in their ears like joyous swindler’s static. “I will always find you,” someone swears, harder this time, a howl in the throat like a new species of dread being born, a wetness pooling in his suprasternal notch. He covers her and opens her and keeps her as unsafe as she has always needed it, governess to grammar school, ghost-trains to Gethesmane or any other garden they’re sure to get kicked out of – Clara, Clara. Please. Stay Breathing, he thinks without saying, lifting her onto him, laying her out in his arms like flight has never, not ever, been impossible.

When she comes, Clara screams into him. He takes it into his bones like one day he will have to pay for this pleasure, hers and his, on top of all the war crimes he’s garroted open for the sake of safeguarding her impossibility. He comes with her, knowing he will ransom himself, knucklebone to screwdriver, transistor-hearts to disco-spleen. He will pay everything he’s worth, and then he will use what has never been his. Try him. Test him. Find him more willing to make a ruin than Gallifrey’s wreckage has ever witnessed.

He presses his mouth to the listening shell of her living, perishing ear, and begins to tell her about a time, billions of years ago, when there once were birds.


End file.
